On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 04:45:19PM +0100, Frank Ellermann wrote:
> > HTTP relaxes this requirement and allows the transport of
> > text media with plain CR or LF alone representing a line
> > break when it is done consistently for an entire entity-body.
> I wonder why HTTP cares about lineends in text media types,
> it has no line buffer with 1000 characters like SMTP. HTTP
> only needs to spot the begin and the end of the body, or the
> similar task for chunks where that's used.
> > HTTP applications MUST accept CRLF, bare CR, and bare LF as
> > being representative of a line break in text media received
> > via HTTP.
> Why should HTTP care at all about lineends in a body, it's not
> supposed to fix them into local lineends on the fly, or is it ?
At least one of the original motivations for HTTP's relaxed treatment
of end-of-line markers in text types was as a server optimization:
so that servers could just send out the bytes in whatever was the
local text format, _without_ having to convert or canonize the text.
(More sopisticated servers are free to do more, but this formulation
allowed a simpler server on various platforms.)
--
Albert Lunde albert-lunde@northwestern.eduatlunde@panix.com (new address for personal mail)
albert-lunde@nwu.edu (old address)